ya laugh it up bro, i bought the 5200 ultra and didn't have one problem with it, i took it back to get the 9600 pro now look at me, ya pretty funny how that piece of s**t ran better then the 9600 pro...

thats too bad for you cuz mines running fine.

Hi to all on this thread, I've posted some stuff and a lot of other members have done the same. But why don't we start a new thread that states the problems with the two major card manufactures and give our veiws. Because it's not really helping the guys that are still haveing troubles with their new cards.

Any good?
ATI OR NVIDIA

hmm spoke too soon.
All i meant was instead of buying an fx5200, atleast get an fx5600 or 5700 instead. The fx5200 barely outperforms an mx440 g4.
Anyways, I downloaded the Far cry demo a week or so ago and it seems to freeze on me if i play a while. I spoke too soon, i thought all games were freeze free but i guess the only games ive tried were wolfenstein ET, COD, and max payne 2 (the only games i play). Now Far cry freezes... i hope its just the demo causing the freeze or im not gonna feel comfortable with ATI's drivers.

hmm spoke too soon.
All i meant was instead of buying an fx5200, atleast get an fx5600 or 5700 instead. The fx5200 barely outperforms an mx440 g4.
Anyways, I downloaded the Far cry demo a week or so ago and it seems to freeze on me if i play a while. I spoke too soon, i thought all games were freeze free but i guess the only games ive tried were wolfenstein ET, COD, and max payne 2 (the only games i play). Now Far cry freezes... i hope its just the demo causing the freeze or im not gonna feel comfortable with ATI's drivers.
Anyone else have the farcry demo and its freezing on them?

See thats what I'm affraid of though because the up coming games that im really looking forward to, HL2, Doom3, WoW, and Farcry, that they will have issues with this card...

i think if anything future games wont have as many problems as the older games cuz the 9600 pro is meant for future games and thats what ATI is prolly working on mostly and not caring so much about older games. My freeze problem might just be the demo or it might be that i have my computer overclocked too much and my ram cant keep up (DDR333 running at FSB 183). So far, far cry is the only game that freezed up on me. ATI's drivers are only getting better... im not too worried that im never gonna be able to use the newer catalyst drivers. btw, your fx5200 isnt gonna be able to run any future games bro. I'd suggest upgrading when the newer games come out and i guess the fx5200 will hold for the games right now.

How many of you have a VPU fan (stock) mounted on the card? I just got an email back from PowerColor support saying that they are pretty sure the card is defective, and to RMA to the supplier. They completely avoided my fan question. Mine is a 9600 Pro w/ 256MB RAM and NO FAN. After I get to a 1280 X 1024 video mode, the card is "firey" hot. That is without any games running. Just a simple 3D screen saver running. So I am wondering if we are all have similar problems....heat related....and that the specs that ATI published for the manufacturers is incorrect.

ok 1300th post here!

could the RV300 core be that temperature sensitive? common sense would dictate so: the .13 micron process crams more transistors into a smaller space, increasing transistor density a great deal. Much like how a small scratch on a DVD may cause bad data reads while the same scratch on a CD would do nothing...that way, even a moderately warm core would mean that the transistors inside are sujected to much more pressure proportionately...AND the smaller die size means less surface area for which heat can be dissipated out of.

fortunately, i have some arctic silver btw the die and HSF = overclock core to 480 =)

The VPU is very small, under the heat sink. I mean reeeeeeealllly small. My bet is you are right. I can't imagine the VPU without some kind of thermal protector....and a FAN!!!! <-----For ATI/Manufacturers

Here's another suggestion to solve this problem:

Get a updated bios from your card manufacturer. You can contact your manufacturer(for me it is sapphire at tech@sapphiretech.com) and give them all the information you can find on the card. in my case I had to give him the pin number(P/n) and serial number(S/N) and the numbers and letters printed on the memory chips.

The above is just a suggestion I actually did the following to solve this problem.
I just had to change my memory settings to 2t,3t,3t,6t. That's 2t for SDRAM CAS latency, 3t for SDRAM RAS to CAS delay, 3t for SDRAM ras precharge time, and 6t for active precharge delay. these settings should be in the chip configuration under the advanced tab in the bios. I'm using an asus a7v600.

I still think this is a driver problem, well in my case and a few others it is.
I have tried 5 different drivers from cat 3.8 which came shipped with my Gex-Cube up to cat 4.1 downloaded from ATI, also the omega 3.10.
The only driver that works is the 3.8 driver and every thing above that crashes windoze XP, with the usual things vertical lines on boot, blank screens, no signal and all the rest.
I can play CoD with the 3.8 with no lock ups with agp write off and sound accelleration off.
I'm thinking that since the only driver that works was the one that was shipped with the 9600 and that the only driver that GeCube have available for download at there site is the same that maybe different third party manufacturers tweek the drivers to suite there cards.
Is it only third party radeons that have problems with drivers or do made by ATI radeons also have problems.

I've been fighting with my SB61G2 for a week or so and have found why RTCW - ET was hanging seconds or minutes into the game.

It was my sound card.

I tried every suggestion (Shuttle BIOS limitations withstanding) to no avail. Whilst testing my onboard video, I removed my sound card (Creative CT4750). A little later, just for the hell of it I tried ET and lo - it worked flawlessly. AGP 8x, Fastwrite enabled, all available BIOS tweaks applied, full hardware acceleration enabled for video and sound.

Who would have thought.

Maybe you're on to something there...

It seems that ATI loads 2 sets of drivers for me in the HardwareProfiles... the primary set for the AGP bus and the secondary for the PCI bus...maybe removal of the sound card did something with that driverset and IRQ settings...? But I can't see how that is possible, since there are no IRQ conflicts listed and by BIOS has "Primary Display" set to "AGP"...

Well my games work fine now but I have to have the Sound disabled on all of them (

I have the onboard C-Media 8738 (MSI KT4 Ultra) and nothing I can do(with sound) can get UT2K3 to run without crashing...would a new sound card do the trick? Im 100% sure its this onboard sound which is crashing the game. All drivers up to date...any ideas?

My only suggeston if you've had to disable your onboard sound is try a PCI sound card. I've had problems with both Creative and CMedia based cards so you might want to steer clear of those.

An earlier suggestion was to change the "PnP OS" option is your BIOS (if you have such an option) to NO. This forces the motherboard to initialise your PCI devices and assign them IRQs. This can sometimes alleviate problems with devices which don't share IRQs particularly well with other devices.

Hi Erik,

Bingo mate, Why does the OS do that??!!!

PS. If don't remember those parents feeding thier kids to crocks, What the dingoies???? Only an Ozzie would know.

Aftering reading crap load of issues with these Radeon borads and hanging in 3d apps I found the solution for mine FINALLY.

Had the same hanging and looping and crashing prob with 3D apps using obth my 9700 pro and 9800XT boards. But noticed that alot of people were NOT having these problems - so what was the common denominator - DUAL CHANNEL MEMORY. I had tried almost all of these different ideas and none worked. Was at the point of just going to buy another MB. Will pricing out the ones that did NOT seem to have a prob with Radeon cards I noticed that the only real diff was that the ones Radeons were having the most probs with were all DUAL CHANNEL boards. I checked sys info and noticed that the Radeons were shearing a good chunk of memory addy's. So as a last dithc effort to get either of these Radeons to work on my system I reconfiged my Twinx (512x2) to run in single channel mode.

BINGO!!!! ALL 3D problems of looping audio - video freezing and hard crashing went away.

I'm thinking that since memory addy problems can rear their ugly heads in many different forms that this is probably the MAIN reason Radeons are having a problem with nvidia 2 or 3 chipset boards. Depending on the addy that is going bad at the time - different fixes have seemed to solve the problem for some but another does the same thing and NOT!

Take the few mintues to configure your Nvidia chipset boards to run single channel only and give it a try - worked for me after 2 1/2 months of screwing around with almost every suggestion in this thread.

Jay

Asus A7N8X Del. rev 1.04 w/ latest bios
ATHLON 3000+xp 400fsb
1 gig Corsair TWINX1024c2 (now running single channel mode)
Built by ATI 9880XT
Audigy 2
Antec 430watt Tru Power

OK OK I know - mis typed it's a 9800XT not a 9880

Hi to Kyz w,

I've got the msi kt400 ultra mobo (ms-6590), and things are fine since I updated the bios, via chipset and using the 4.1 video drivers. I got the agp 8x going and with fast writes on. The onboard sound is on but in 2 channel mode. I had problems with my gexcube radeon 9600 128 pro with the 8x thing but with new drivers with a bios flash worked. By the way I found that the msi pc alert 4 was mis reporting the temps thats why I flashed the bios to see if it worked. And it did also all of the games worked as well.

Marc from Morwell